Forum:Is there a way to cut down on spam pages?
Because we've been getting a lot of them lately. My coding-fu is pretty near non-existent, so I've no idea how we could go about it, but isn't there something we can do? Other than all pitch in and delete the awful things as soon as they pop up, that is (which we've been doing a very good job of, go us). -Evaneyreddeman 10:49, November 11, 2009 (UTC) :I don't think there is anything for us to do coding-wise. We used to get practically no spam, which was remarkable, and now we're getting some, which is more normal as I understand things. Maybe we've made it on to a spammers' list of reasonably popular wikis. (Go us, indeed.) Which is not to say there might not be more we can do (in cooperation with Wikia), this is just off the top of my head. ⚙Zarchne 18:52, November 11, 2009 (UTC) : Two options I can think of: :# Only allow signed in users to post -- make it harder for spammers. Most wiki software allows this option. I'm against this option as it also makes it harder for random visitors to help and 1) I think helpful random visitors are more common than spammers, and 2) many regular contributors started as random visitors who edited. :# Does Wikia allow blocking IP ranges? Look at the IP addresses of the spammers and if they are similar block larger ranges. :# Ask Wikia for advice, they might be seeing the problem from a higher level and have a better grasp of the big picture and what ranges to block. (Who is the most recent Wikia employee to stop by and say hello?) :OK, that's three. So I can't count today. Argadi 20:05, November 11, 2009 (UTC) ::I'm not sure we can block IP addresses or IP ranges. I'll have to poke around. It wouldn't surprise me if we can't, though. So I guess that means reporting the spam to the Wikia admins. I'm not in any particular hurry; the spam is only at the "annoying" stage and not the "taking up too much of our time" stage. (Yes, it's remarkable we haven't had more spam up til now. Count our blessings, I guess). Still, I'll try to make time to at least find out who to talk to. (Still editing from work, no internet at home...)-Evaneyreddeman 15:50, November 12, 2009 (UTC) ::: We can block IP addresses, all current blocks are IP addresses. It appears IP ranges can be blocked since discourages the practice. Argadi 17:14, November 12, 2009 (UTC) ::::I'm one of the admins at the Althistory wikia and we get a page now and again, read: 1 every month or three. We just block the ip for a certain amount of time and that seems enough to discourage it. Pretty rare, actually. Dr. Cayne Armand 23:51, November 12, 2009 (UTC) What's been happening I looked thru the wikia logs and examined the contributions from the anon users. The spam is coming in two flavors, Russian and English. It has gotten more frequent since halloween. Here are dates, ip addrs, and notes. * 11:11, November 16, 2009 121.173.118.31 ru spam * 00:14, November 16, 2009 92.100.43.218 en spam * 14:09, November 15, 2009 87.118.124.11 en spam * 08:41, November 15, 2009 217.20.118.75 en spam * 23:36, November 14, 2009 66.197.221.159 en spam * 09:45, November 14, 2009 174.123.132.250 en spam * 12:06, November 13, 2009 222.166.160.179 ru spam * 23:17, November 11, 2009 89.136.179.170 en spam * 10:45, November 11, 2009 76.197.230.96 ru spam * 02:21, November 11, 2009 212.235.107.76 en spam * 10:22, November 10, 2009 118.231.111.11 ru spam * 17:25, November 9, 2009 92.100.61.53 en spam * 11:03, November 9, 2009 208.98.57.231 ru spam * 06:44, November 4, 2009 79.116.136.209 ditto of last spam * 11:06, October 31, 2009 79.116.139.196 en spam * 00:38, October 31, 2009 92.100.204.237 en spam * 03:07, October 25, 2009 219.90.91.69 ru spam All the spam seems to be creating new pages except for the first which repurposed a frequently used template. --Rej ¤¤? 20:03, November 14, 2009 (UTC) P.S. The least intrusive thing that might help would be to require anons to pass a "I'm a human, not a bot test." when creating a new page. --Rej 20:12, November 14, 2009 (UTC) : Add 92.100.43.218 to the list; I just deleted the English spam page (hey, probably useful to practice admin-fu every now and then anyway...) but did not block the submitter. Once these get started, they're hard to stop. -- that old bearded guy 01:07, November 16, 2009 (UTC) Okay, looks like we've got swine flu The spam activity has picked up today. Several more incidents in less than 24 hours on our site. ;It's not local: Googling for the unlikely title part "Republican Bacchanalia" shows the spam is part of a larger effort on someones part to ??? annoy or block the usefulness of the web. The variety of ip addrs means we're probably being tormented through a zombie farm. The questions are why, how, and how to protect our site. Stopping the spammer would be good. A "human" test on saving anon new pages is now a necessity. Since that might take a while to get into place, I think we should for the limited time till then require users be signed in to post. It's an inconvenience but for the time until the spaming dies down, necessary.. --Rej ¤¤? 22:40, November 16, 2009 (UTC) Hmm. User:Uberfuzzy seems to have a way to deal with cross wikia spam. What we get also appears on Freeciv and Borderlands. So part of what to do is to get one of his 'bots to help clean. --Rej ¤¤? 23:24, November 16, 2009 (UTC) Ned Batchelder has some good idea's on countermeasures. --Rej 02:02, November 17, 2009 (UTC) Its not just here, its ALL OVER WIKIA. We're developing tools to clean what slips through (what you've seen my name do already), and take actions to block their IP's/pagenames as fast as we can. As for Ned's page, we already do most of those, and are beginning testing on captchas for more actions, but we have to be very careful, so that we dont drive people away. If you want, I can disable logged out people's ability to create pages on this wiki. Let me know on my talk page if you want this done. --Uberfuzzy 21:00, November 17, 2009 (UTC) ::??? Have you implemented the "form only a bot would be fool enough to fill out" measure? If that were part of making a new page it would catch most of the "stupid" spam. Then because it is an interwiki problem add the foolish bot id's to a list of anon's we are prejudiced against. So as to stop other posts on more wikia's. We have a problem here. Freeciv has a plague. The sites will need to help one another. --Rej ¤¤? 22:20, November 17, 2009 (UTC) Volunteer Spam Task Force Is a place to report spam. It is more locked down than your usual wiki. So using it means having to login etc. While I've decided it is not appropriate for me (as a non-admin) it is possibly a good resource for someone with a bent for admin duties. Hopefully we can find some here willing to have a presence there as well. --Rej ¤¤? 02:19, November 29, 2009 (UTC) : It sounds great for a non-admin. If I see spam in our wiki I can delete it, but I often sleep and occasionally work. You can get spam deleted by reporting it to the VSTF. Argadi 08:55, November 29, 2009 (UTC) :The VSTF was made to deal with spam issues on a more global scale, on the thousands of wikis that dont have a community, or an admin to take care of things. This wiki is an active one, so they would likely leave spam here alone (other then shotgun wikia-wide delete tools) for local admins to delete. Maybe you should consider adding Rej as a sysop, to cover the times that the few active admins arent around. Just suggesting from an outsider's prespective. :That wiki is extra locked down, because there are almost spam filters or protections on it at all. They greatly hinder the reporting process, so we needed to keep it filtered, but also not a haven for spam to show up on. There is a report page (linked on menu) that is open for ANYONE to add stuff to with no other hoops. The wiki wasnt really made to be an informative or teaching place. It was just meant to have a common (but out of the way) for people to report spam issues on, rather then the disjointed places that were being used. I'll talk to the people working on revamping the help pages, and see if we can get more admin'y spamish type stuff added. --Uberfuzzy 21:53, December 15, 2009 (UTC) ::The report spam page is only editable to those logged in. Logging in and having an account on a separate wiki was enough of a speed bump that I sat back and rethought my mission. I am basically here to have fun and to add creative content. Some of the nuts and bolts stuff appeals to me because it engages my curiosity to see what can be done with it. The spam stuff I got involved with due to curiosity about its origins and the puzzle of the problem of how to deal with it. When I say I am a non-admin I mean that from a mission point of view. I do not have the spirit for day to day admin work. So I don't offer to do so. --Rej 00:19, December 16, 2009 (UTC) :::There is a non editor report page now http://vstf.wikia.com/index.php?title=Report:Spam. And you dont need to have a seperate account. All Wikia.com wikis (well, save a very very small list), use a shared user system, so your account is valid at all of them (like 75k+ wikis) --Uberfuzzy 23:52, January 2, 2010 (UTC) Pathfinding and clue finding Pathfinding and clue finding are another matter. Which is how I got to be involved with the spam thing. On our wiki, Argadi and a few others can deal with spam directly. Argadi is dedicated enough that I now know I don't have to push. My curiosity was that most of the spam did not seem to be doing itself much good by appearing here. So I went looking for *Where it came from and *Where else it went *Who had dealt with it and *How they were effective *Why was there a sudden surge on our site? I got some answers and a whole lot more questions. It's clear to me that either the wikia is doing a pretty good job or the attacks here have not been too intense. We don't get a great deal of spam and hardly any vandalism on this site. Its also clear there are blind spots. 98% of the remaining spam is new pages by anon users. That hole could be plugged. Spammers could get around the plug but they might not bother. The surge started around Halloween. So my guess is more bots activated on the date trigger. If that is correct then there will probably be a holiday surge around the end of this year beginning of next. The frequency has died down now. The help each site gives the others could be vastly improved. Spam needs to be treated like molestation. You need not only to thwart the attempt you also need to report so the molester can't attack others. The willing sysops on each site need mutual support. How do you use regex to block page titles? On this site we could easily block permanently any Russian titles especially the ones having to do with mailling lists., sales and ads. Recent example with google translations: ;Разместить рекламу на досках, форумах, каталогах, вебдизайн и др :Place ads on bulletin boards, forums, directories, web design, etc. ;Продается мобильный телефон новый :Sale a new mobile phone ;Рассылки рекламы на доски, форумы и др. сайты :Mailing lists advertising boards, forums and other sites By being less specific we would filter more spam before it disrupted the focus of our contributors or the sleep of our sysops. Right now for lack of knowledge only full titles are being blocked. Spam generally mutates titles to get around this. Thats probably more than enough for now. Thanks Uberfuzzy for your time and thought. It's given me an excuse to get these thoughts out of my system. Hope some of them prove useful. Cheers --Rej 00:19, December 16, 2009 (UTC) The end of quietude April 2010 FYI, I just used the VSTF page to report Russian spam I found on the Forum:Referendum: Moving the Wiki (page has been moved and this title now protected --Rej ¤¤? ) page (see its Talk page for more info). I 'fixed' it by using Undo on History...is there something more to be done? Do I need to tell an Admin what I did? I found something similar last week...someone had replaced the entire Jägermonster page with a comma. I undid that one too, just no reporting (didn't know if that was spam or vandalism or simple mistake). The spambots may be rising again... CaptMorgan 19:17, April 20, 2010 (UTC) :Hi Capt, :Thanks, comment spam seems to be on the rise. Some spammers have figured out how to get around the login for new pages trick. (That kept things quiet). I've blocked some of the anon users who have put spam on the site but I suspect this won't have too much effect. We just have to see how bad it gets. So far they seem to only have found the one two three pages. -- Rej Maddog : Thanks for fixing the problem. No need to report it, active moderators tend to monitor all changes (except when they don't have Internet access for a week—it will take me a long time to catch up on everything I missed). The important thing is to fix the spam quickly (so new visitors don't see it, and so spammers see we don't let their pages stay around). Argadi 21:51, April 26, 2010 (UTC) :: Hmmm. There might be reason to report. The spam has definitely spiked up. We are being visited from servers in China now. And I think we have seen at least four incidents. I am hoping that protecting the pages will stop the vandals. Nothing here for you, move on. If it doesn't work we'll try the next level. --Rej ¤¤? 02:50, April 27, 2010 (UTC) Gimbal reports a known spammer #27581 http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ip_92.243.167.172 page found while googling the domain Londonn.ru I think we and wikia would be well off banning any titles with that domain name in the title. The purpose of the spammer seems to be raise the sites profile. He hasn't been active in a while until recently. So he is likely ramping up. --Rej ¤¤? 08:16, December 23, 2009 (UTC) Regular expression Some spam could be averted by protecting pages with regular expressions. Wikia could make clearer what expression it accepts. Giving some examples of generally useful patterns would also help. --Rej ¤¤? 03:28, December 30, 2009 (UTC) : Ahh, found this help The Flex 3 Regular Expression Explorer from Ryan Swanson. -Rej 03:28, December 30, 2009 (UTC) : Is there any indication that Wikia takes anything other than explicit file names when protecting page titles? Argadi 12:20, December 30, 2009 (UTC) :: Most of what I've read indicates they block by regex. Their block lists have regex expressions in them. ::It would make sense for them to do so. It would be useful if they were explicit about this. It would be really useful if the explicitness were somewhere easy to find. --Rej ¤¤? 00:00, December 31, 2009 (UTC) :If absolutely needed, we can enable a local title blacklist (if i havent already...) for things that plague just this wiki. The admins need to decide if they want this. and . Additionally, I've disabled anon's ability to create new pages at this wiki. They can still edit, just not create new. This should stop most of the cross-wiki spam that spews across many many wikis. --Uberfuzzy 00:02, January 3, 2010 (UTC) ::Hmm. Your restriction has kept things quiet. No spam here so far in the new year. --Rej ¤¤? 20:23, January 15, 2010 (UTC)